'It's been difficult for a CFO to go through the last three years that we have just had and not feel some element of stress. And yes, I am using English understatement," deadpans Philip Keller, chief financial officer of Intermediate Capital Group.

With £2bn to £2.5bn of borrowings outstanding at any one time, historically supplied by numerous syndicates of banks he didn't really know well, some stress is understandable. Yet Keller is among those treasurers taking their businesses through the corporate equivalent of The Priory.

If 2012 is to be remembered for anything other than the Olympics, the Diamond Jubilee and the collapse of the euro, it should be as the year that Britain's companies unhook themselves from the addictive drip of bank debt. It will be painful.

But it will be worth it, so the thinking goes in Whitehall. The Chancellor asked Legal & General's chief executive, Tim Breedon, to work out in time for his March Budget what can be done to make it easier for corporate Britain to resist the bank "Kool-Aid" and make more use of alternative sources of finance.

Dependency on banks when the banks themselves are far from healthy is one cause for the loss of corporate confidence, the Treasury argues. As Mr Breedon wrote in The Sunday Telegraph at the start of the month, private company bond issues will be part of the review.

The Treasury is already planning to shoe-horn £1bn of public money into co-investment funds that will lend directly to British companies. Bids from fund managers are due in February and the Treasury has allocated at least £150m to get the Business Finance Partnership scheme going.

It is likely to operate in a similar way to the M&G UK Companies Financing Fund, which raised £500m from Prudential – its parent – and over £900m from other insurance and pension funds, to lend directly to UK companies sums of between £30m and £100m, at rates of between 4pc and 6pc over Libor and maturities of typically around seven years.

A spokesman said the fund was gaining momentum after a slow start, backing nine companies such as Northgate, Stobart and Barratt Developments, since May 2010 with £780m in loans. The hope is that funds such as M&G's will be used by firms as a viable alternative source of finance.

The attraction for mid-sized companies is that they don't have to secure a credit rating or subject themselves to the due diligence demanded of a bond issue on the public markets. The catch is that bank debt remains cheap for the right borrowers.

Martin O'Donovan, policy director at the Association of Corporate Treasurers, did some calculations on the relative cost of a bond issue over bank debt.

He found that a company with a BBB rating could secure a £250m five-year bank loan at a rough margin of 1.1pc over Libor, which even he says is "surprisingly low". Arrangement fees of 0.75pc of the value of the loan and external advisory fees of roughly £50,000 all add up. As do new facility utilisation and commitment fees – the price now charged by banks for just having the facility without drawing on it fully.

But an equivalent private placement bond with a 10-year maturity attracts a rough price of Libor plus 2pc, a 0.5pc arrangement fee and around £60,000 of advisory fees. "Talk to people like M&G and they are not finding the demand. Part of it is that borrowers are not familiar with it and it is partly because the costs can look expensive," says O'Donovan.

But he believes mid-sized companies should get used to the idea of paying a bit more to become less reliant on the banks. The savings from the longer refinancing cycle and the benefits of secure funds on long-term business planning should not be underestimated, he adds.

One company tackling its addiction head-on is Intermediate Capital Group, a senior debt and mezzanine finance provider to private equity deals. It borrows between £2bn and £2.5bn at any one time and so has to think about these things quite carefully. "Historically, that was bank finance but the world has changed dramatically," says Philip Keller.

It means that whereas three years ago banks supplied two-thirds of ICG's finance, Keller expects that to settle at around 50pc in the future, with the bank debt all concentrated in around six banks rather than dozens in multiple syndicates.

The financial crisis is forcing ICG to innovate. It is used to tapping the US private-placement market, but has now begun exploring the UK – borrowing £75m in December from M&G and issuing a £35m retail bond to wealthy private investors via brokers such as Brewin Dolphin and Charles Stanley.

The M&G paper – with maturities ranging from five to seven years – helped Keller to manage the profile of ICG's debt. He doesn't want all its loans coming up for renewal at the same time.

"With the changing regulations and the changing sentiment we are better off going out a little longer and borrowing a bit more to make sure we are not subject to the next bank strategic review," he says.

He adds that the retail bond market was "hard work", not least that rich private investors still like to know who it is they are backing. The likes of M&S and Tesco Bank can get retail bonds away relatively easily, but few had heard of ICG outside of the Square Mile. The size of the investor base, even compared with continental Europe, is also "small". "There's really only a handful of brokers pushing it," says Keller.

Yet he can see the potential. "I feel quite bullish about this market at the moment. I feel there's a gap where savers want yield and companies want liquidity. We need to find a way to bring that together."

The legwork is worth it, he adds. "The banks accept they are not able to lend to their favourite clients in the way they used to so they are starting to help."

In fact, if a bank can help a client to raise funds from private sources but retain its main facilities, then this could suit it down to the ground. "It's a fact of life that the banks will want to lend less but keep all the goodies, the ancillary services," says Keller.